Pubdate: Sat, 09 Apr 2016 Source: Dallas Morning News (TX) Copyright: 2016 The Dallas Morning News, Inc. Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/ Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117 Author: Robyn Short Note: Robyn Short is a mediator, peace-building trainer and publisher at Good-Media Press. WORDS USED AS WEAPONS CAUSE SOCIAL DAMAGE War on Drugs, for Example, Was an Assault on Black People, Robyn Short Says Whoever said, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" must have been on the receiving end of a very kind-speaking stick thrower. Words matter. Too often in American politics, words are used as weapons that can cause social damage that takes far longer to repair than any broken bone. Democrats and Republicans both use language to dehumanize, vilify and separate the people of this nation. By doing so, they indirectly foster a culture that permits harmful actions against "the other," and even deems such action morally correct. Consider the language Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton used to declare war on drugs. In a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper's Magazine, Nixon's aide John Ehrlich-man said the War on Drugs was designed as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies. In his remarks to the nation June 17, 1971, Nixon stated: "America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive." Wars require enemies and enemies are not conceptual or intangible. Enemies are human. Therefore, the enemy Nixon was, in theory, referring to was every American abusing drugs. Yet, that is not who the War on Drugs targeted. The War on Drugs was an "all-out offensive" on an "enemy": black America. Nixon's war against blacks became a rallying cry for politicians for the next four decades. Reagan said: "We intend to do what is necessary to end the drug menace and to eliminate this dark, evil enemy within." Under his presidency, the War on Drugs focused on crack cocaine with an aggressive media campaign associating these words with imagery of black people smoking and dealing crack, a drug derived from powder cocaine that is sold in small rocks and marketed to people who could not afford the powder drug. The Reagan administration created and perpetuated the imagery of "crack whores" and "crack babies," dehumanizing words used as weapons inaccurately directed toward the black community. Nancy Reagan chose particularly inflaming words: "If you are a casual drug user, you are an accomplice to murder." When people are identified as participants in murder, it becomes logical in time to ostracize those people by locking them away. Her words foreshadowed the impending fate of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug users. In a U.S. Sentencing Commission hearing, Sen. Orrin Hatch said, "These people are killing our kids. These people are disrupting society. These people are wrecking our society." With his three-strikes-you're out policy, Clinton ensured "these people" would never be released from prison. Forty years of dehumanizing language directed toward blacks has resulted in the United States being the most incarcerated nation in the world. The results: Of the 2.3 million incarcerated population, 1 million are black people. Millions of children live in broken homes as parents go to prison. Black children are treated as predators. Blacks face police brutality and street-level executions at the hands of police. Still, during all this time, the level of illegal drug use hasn't changed. And still, politics remains a shameful parade of fearmongering and dangerous hate speech, leading to a climate in which Donald Trump can thrive as a presidential candidate. In this environment, riots are routine, hate groups openly participate in campaign rallies, discrimination and threats against religious groups are constant and even celebrated, and the degradation of women is fodder for super-PAC campaigns. Political rhetoric has become so divisive, in part, because we, the constituents, reward politicians for it. We reward them by reading and listening to their words, then retweeting them and sharing on Facebook, and by cheering at campaign rallies and town hall meetings. We give life to their words. We take them and hurl them like bombs with no regard for the destruction of our shared humanity. Without our unwavering support, politicians would change tactics. The more hate language we greedily consume, the more hate language they generously feed us. Together we are degrading our humanity, and we are so busy blaming the other party that we don't even recognize the role we play in the process. As Mahatma Gandhi proved, nonviolence and truth are powerful instruments of change. He demonstrated that purity in words and actions can mobilize a nation. We can choose words of violence, or we can choose words of peace. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom